Abstract: Trio is a new type of database system that manages uncertainty and lineage of data as first-class concepts, along with the data itself. Uncertainty and lineage arise in a variety of data-intensive applications, including scientific and sensor data management, data cleaning and integration, and information extraction systems. This talk will survey our ongoing work in the Trio project: the new extended-relational "ULDB" model upon which the Trio system is based, Trio's SQL-based query language (TriQL) including formal and operational semantics, and a selection of new theoretical challenges and results. We will explain and demonstrate Trio's initial prototype implementation, and describe our planned research directions.

Trio web site: http://infolab.stanford.edu/trio/

Short Bio: Jennifer Widom is a Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments at Stanford University. She received her Bachelors degree from the Indiana University School of Music in 1982 and her Computer Science Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1987. She was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center before joining the Stanford faculty in 1993. Her research interests span many aspects of nontraditional data management. She is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, was a Guggenheim Fellow, and has served on a variety of program committees, advisory boards, and editorial boards.